Company of Heroes 2 an “Insult to Russian History”

Americans “saving the world” during World War II isn’t a new thing in entertainment. If you believed the Hollywood version of events, the bravest of the brave all came from the US and everybody else died rather embarrassingly or wouldn’t have saved the day without the help of said US soldiers. Even games like Company of Heroes 2, which hints at something vaguely fact-based, isn’t above painting certain people in a very good light and others in a very bad light.

If you don’t live in the US, this is constantly a source of minor annoyance, but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a group so angry that their country’s history has been so distorted. That’s until today.

In a YouTube video entitled “Why Russians Hate Company of Heroes 2,” The Bad Comedian goes through a variety of different factually inaccurate and downright offensive representations of Russia. It’s an interesting video and runs at just above the half hour mark.

Comments tend to vary between Americans who don’t get what the problem is – it’s not meant to be 100% factually accurate, after all – and Russians who do genuinely seem offended by how their people were portrayed within Company of Heroes 2. Between the mudslinging, there’s some fantastic discussion, but you’ll probably need Google Translate and a little bit of liberal reading to follow it throughout.

Funnily enough, this is a story that doesn’t seem to have leaked out all that far. The Bad Comedian claims this is because any discussion of the Russian’s portrayal has been removed from the official forums, although how true that is is hard to tell.

Company of Heroes 2 currently has an 80 rating on Metacritic, which indicates most people have been incredibly positive about it. However, it has over 1000 negative user reviews, some complaining about the game’s incorrect telling of history. Others were upset about day one DLC and not enough difference between this and the original Company of Heroes.